Soon after Antwan Wilson became chancellor of the D.C. public schools, he put in place a strict policy about transferring from one school to another to ensure that there was no favoritism. Everyone was expected to use the lottery, especially public officials.
Then he pulled some strings to get his daughter from a school where she was unhappy to a school with a long waiting list. When the news broke, parents were outraged. The outrage was so great that he was forced to resign, along with the administrator who facilitated the transfer.
The mayor picked an interim chancellor who started as a kindergarten teacher in D.C., then moved to NYC where she was a principal, then returned to D.C.
D.C. is currently immersed in the graduation rate scandal. What a mess. This is the district that reformers like to call a model. A model of what?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Ethics. Ethics!
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Unfortunately for the children of Washington, DCPS is being used as a toy to make political points and advance the careers of ambitious education reformers who may have little idea how to run a school system.
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Spot on. Can I quote you? This is exactly the game being played in TN.
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Sorry, I’d rather you didn’t. I am personally familiar with the events in DC (I worked in DCPS for ten eye-opening months), but not with TN.
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WILSON was known for causing upheaval, invasions and fear in districts long before he was hired by Wash. DC. He didn’t get the job for his ability, but through Big Money connections. Oh, that he can be pushed completely out of the education picture.
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Are the attempts at reform in DC all bad? I’m impressed with their transformation of the dreary literacy block from all-skills into a content-rich time:
“Content of the 120-minute literacy block changes throughout the school year, giving every student an opportunity to build content knowledge about the world around him/her and develop a curiosity for the unknown. Each topic is studied for several weeks. Students read a variety of articles and books, are exposed to primary sources, paired texts, and pictures and videos about each topic. Some highlights of what students will be learning in SY 2017-2018 are:
Kindergartners learn about:
Friendship and citizenship
Weather
Conservation
Community workers
First graders learn about:
The history of flight and how airplanes work
The sun, moon, and stars
Money and making choices
The human body
Second graders learn about:
Plant life cycles
Geology
Activists and activism
Our neighbors: Canada and Mexico
Third graders learn about:
Animal habitats
Forces and magnetism
People and characters who have overcome adversity
Our city: Washington DC
Fourth graders learn about:
Early America
The Revolution and independence
Rocks and minerals
Heroic Adventures
Fifth graders learn about:
The solar system
The Civil Rights movement
Inventions and discoveries
Westward expansion in the United States”
This seems vastly better than the American norm, which is to have kids close read random texts ad nauseam with no thought toward building content knowledge.
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Define reform. Please.
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An attempt to improve.
The tests and attacks on unions were misguided. But the curriculum reforms seem wise. I think it is unwise of us to demonize everything the reformers do. There are sincere and smart people on that side, and not everything they do is misguided. (Granted, the NCLB testing regime was a Vietnam-magnitude fiasco.) By the same token, not everything the “resistance” does is wise. As I frequently point out here, most of the public school teachers we valorize here are embracing a deeply flawed theory of education (skills-centrism) and many are quite incurious about any alternative. The new science on this matter is quite devastating to this misguided orthodoxy. This is hurting our kids. I wish the unions and public school teachers were leading the way toward curriculum reform instead of the self-styled Reformers, but they’re not.
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Thank you for clarifying for the audience.
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Many thoughtful points. Biggest quibble I have is your referring to the NCLB testing regime (absolutely agree with the comparison to Vietnam) as if it’s in the past. As far as I can see, it’s still here.
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Ponderosa: You’re making a pretty big assumption: that the kids are actually having an opportunity to learn “rich content.” With the hyper-focus on testing, kids could be “learning” this content with one reading passage that they use to teach some Language Arts “skill,” and then never doing anything about that content again.
That’s how history is “taught” in the elementary schools in my district. As a result, my students come to 8th grade history and 9th grade geography knowing absolutely NOTHING about history and geography. This includes such basics as which direction north is usually shown on a map, what the continents are, and who won the American Revolution.
I kid you not. All of these questions (and many more questions on basic facts that kids used to learn in first or second grade) have been asked me by students in the last two years. They do NOT learn anything about history and geography when the focus is some English “skill,” and not actual content.
So, I’m pretty skeptical of those curricular claims.
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TOW: I do think DC is different. I recently watched a video of a conference sponsored by KnowledgeMatters that included Corrine Colgan, the administrator in charge of the DC curriculum changes. She’s clearly on board with Hirsch and the growing list of intellectuals who understand the wrong turn our schools have made. The video is here –scroll down to the embedded YouTube video called “The Reading Paradox and the ESSA Solution”: http://knowledgematterscampaign.org/seize-the-day/#resourcesteachers
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Ponderosa, you sound like a Russian bot. You keep repeating disinformation. You don’t have any evidence for your claims about the philosophy and practice of American teachers. How do you know what they believe and how they teach?
You don’t. Some guy with a political agenda and highly selective and debatable arguments told you, you became a true believer, and you now you keep attacking American teachers en masse–without any substantial knowledge of what those teachers actually do and or what they believe. (To do this, you would actually have to study teachers full time–or cite credible objective sources. Sorry, Hirsch isn’t a credible or objective source. He is a zealot, and as such is blind to all aspects of education other than the few that he misguidedly proselytizes about.)
I taught for over thirty years and had lots of colleagues and I guarantee that not one of them was “anti-knowledge” or “skills-obsessed.” If you study what you quoted, however, you’ll find the buzz words (such as “paired texts”) that are straight out of the hated Coleman playbook. David Coleman paid lip service to “building content knowledge” in more than one speech touting the Common Core. But if the stated curriculum were the main determinant of school success, and you think the overview you quoted is great, then you might expect the D.C. schools to have improved as a result of the “reforms” you approve of. From what I understand, that hasn’t happened.
There’s a lot more going on in classrooms and neighborhoods that is not dependent on a stated course of study. Whatever modest improvements in test scores that have occurred in rich areas of D.C., you can’t really claim that making a list of content topics to be studied in language arts class has made a big difference in the quality of D.C. schools.
In any case, your attacks on American teachers really ought to stop. Why don’t you just cultivate your own garden instead of fantasizing about the horrible state of gardening nationwide?
I agree with Diane, stop trashing teachers. Especially since you really don’t know what you’re talking about.
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Not surprisingly the linked article has an all-too-typical slant for the “rookie mistake” [to borrow a get-out-of-jail-free phrase applied to LAUSD’s Ref Rodriguez by the corporate education reform crowd] committed by Antwan Wilson.
Poor fella! I mean, why should HE have to follow HIS OWN policies and procedures—that HE mandated and enforced on everyone else?
Superficial differences aside, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” [the more things change, the more they stay the same]. As in Leona “The Queen of Mean” Helmsley’s remark concerning the obligations of ‘special’ people like herself and her tycoon husband: “We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.”
Oh, the irony of it all: a leader of the self-described “new civil rights movement of our time” who could better be described as a leader of the “new uncivil rights movement of our time.”
😎
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It’s not a rookie mistake. The media is giving him a free pass. He pulled the same stunt here in Oakland when, somehow, he was able to get his children enrolled into arguably the “best” (read: wealthy) high-demand school in Oakland. He feels entitled to cheat the system, and it wasn’t the first time…
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Hitting the nail on the head in describing Wilson: He feels entitled to cheat the system…
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A “model of what?”
A model of dysfunction. A model of deceit. A model of nonsense.
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A model of what? A model of the plague which Eli Broad’s Supernintendo Academy has spread across our educational landscape.
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IMPORTANT to note this connection: BROAD’S men.
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This article is interesting .. and recalls “The Curious Case of Art Siebens”
Washington, D.C. City Councilman and current Chair of D.C.’s Education Committee David Grosso — and Rhee / Henderson cheerleader — regrets Wilson leaving because Grosso thinks chancellor “turnover” is just as damaging for D.C.’s children as … wait for it, folks … turnover among principals:
https://wamu.org/story/18/02/20/head-of-d-c-s-schools-resigns-after-personal-scandal-and-amid-district-tumult/
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“D.C. Council member David Grosso, who chairs the council’s education committee, says he fears that losing Wilson and having to find a new chancellor will set back the city’s public schools, especially as they navigate the current graduation scandal and a recent decline in enrollment.
“ ‘Stability in the chancellor position is very important, and having a lot of turnover, just like a lot of turnover in the principal position, is not good for the city, it’s not good for the schools,’ he says. ‘This is frustrating for me, and it sets us back.’ ”
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Hey, wait, didn’t this same clown support Michelle Rhee throughout the entirety of her chancellorship?
And didn’t Michelle Rhee fire 2/3rds of D.C.s principals as soon as she got in office, and then two years later fire almost all of those whom she hired to replace those 2/3rds?
And then repeated this asinine process once more before leaving in Fall 2010?
Though the councilman didn’t mention the same damaging effect of teacher turnover, that’s another thing that Rhee loved to do. Along with her mass firing-then-hiring-then-firing-again of principals, she did the same thing with her firing of thousands of lteachers with decades in the classroom (and accompanying high salaries), claiming that this was equally necessary and equally beneficial for children.
Since when did this guy re-discover his love of “stability” is the staffing of schools?
Rhee always despised those high salaries for veteran teachers, claiming, “You know that we can hire two newcomers to teaching for every one of those veterans that we were able to fire. We’re finally putting kids first!” Right after she took over in 2007, Rhee lied to those teachers, claiming to those same,
(from memory, not an exact quote)
“This new contract, should you approve it, will give you all huge raises in exchange for giving up your job protections. Now, I know what you’re thinking, if I have a high salary, that will make you veterans delicious targets for firing, and that with no due process protections, you’ll be quickly canned to save money. Oh perish the thought. If you’re an effective teachers at whatever salary, you have nothing to worry about. I mean, why would I ever want to get rid of a teacher that’s effective and doing a great job teaching?”
Tell that to teacher Art Siebens and his supporters: (NOTE Siebens’ and this students’ stellar results)
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/the-curious-case-of-wilson-senior-highs-art-siebens/article/34021
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For Michelle Rhee to work her magic, she needed a way to get rid of the deadwood. She caught a lucky break in June of 2008 when Woodrow Wilson High School was reorganized after failing to make Adequate Yearly Progress for 5 years under No Child Left Behind. This gave Michelle’s energetic young choice for principal Peter Cahall a chance to clear out all the old lazy clock punching teachers at the school and replace them with new younger more energetic teachers. One of those lazy teachers was Dr. Art Siebens who was politely told, “you don’t fit in” as he was shown the door. Rhee had recruited Cahall very heavily from Montgomery County and he was clearly chosen for a task such as this.
“Unfortunately, that wasn’t good enough for Dr. Art Siebens. It seems he felt that his 18 years of experience teaching weren’t a liability, but something to be proud of. Siebens is the type of teacher that some misguided educators might think of as innovative. Using hippie folk music to teach AP biology, Dr. Siebens had some minimal success.
“According to the reinstate Dr. Art website, ‘on the 2007 AP Biology exam, 41 of the 43 students (95.3%) with scores of 3 – 5 throughout the District of Columbia Public Schools had taken Dr. Siebens’ class, and of the seventeen students who received a score of 5 out of 5 on the AP Biology exam, all of them had taken his class. And on the 2008 AP Biology exam, every single student who received a score of 2 or above in the all of DCPS were students of Dr. Siebens. Minority students in Dr. Siebens’ AP classes achieved scores of 3-5 (50%) at a rate twice the average of all Wilson’s other AP courses (23%). Over 64% of Dr. Siebens’ students over the past five years were in classes other than his AP classes.”
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and here:
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/the-curious-case-of-wilson-senior-highs-art-siebens/article/34021
and here:
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(I live in metro WashDC). The DC publicly-operated schools are a mess. Is it any wonder that the public school system has the lowest participation rate in the entire USA? And as bad as DC schools are, Prince George’s county MD is worse! People illegally enroll their kids in DC schools, and sneak them in on an underground railroad.
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Charles,
DC has achoool choice.
It has charters and vouchers.
Half the kids are in charters.
Any ideas?
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Careful with the Underground Railroad references, please.
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A graduate of the illustrious Broad Academy. Promoted to DC Chancellor after he drove Oakland into the ground. No doubt the next job will be Broad Academy Fellow.
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